Kris King:  

The one picture of my self I like is one that was never taken. I have quite flattering, if melodramatic, modeling pictures of my self when I was thin with a broken heart and layered in lipstick and an elaborate 40s coiffure. But they have nothing to do with how I see myself. This is the picture. I am fifteen and a half, leggy from a summer of sudden growth. It is the mid-summer dusk that imperceptibly bends into night far north of the ecuator. The shaded slopes and gullies give off a damp green smell of temperature change. You can see it. The sun is orange and potent on the rows of summer wheat and on my face. I am straining my head towards the sun, catching it before it slips behind the mountains. My long hair is in braids fuzzy from two days wear and flies straight back. My thighs are clenched, my feet are bare and I am laughing. I am laughing and pounding up the slope of a hill on a chestnut gelding 16-hands high. My head is in the sun, my torso in the shade and my legs are hot and damp with sweat and horsehair. I am happy. I hold that picture because it is both very common and very unique. It embodies my absurdly idyllic pastoral childhood. But it is one of the last times I will be happy without people. Not happy because of, or in spite of, people. I am communing, to be certain. The horse and I are one. But we are one in doing something for the sheer pleasure of it. This will not happen for me again. At fifteen and a half I succumb to the social stream that dictates my role as Server. Helper. Supporter. Couselor. Caretaker. Nurturer. Orifice. Condiment. I no longer exist to myself. I exist in reference to others. I am good at this, and genuinely enjoy helping but do not yet realize that I can¿t really help anyone at all. It is just adding tears to a rainstorm. Tears add salt but don¿t change anything else. I am unhappy for many years. I do not yet know that there is no way to help enough, or to be good enough. So I try harder. I try to become what they look like to me...Expand for more